The Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry

November 16, 2016

An exciting new scholarship has been established at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. The Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry it is to be awarded annually to an OISE thesis student conducting antipsychiatry inquiry. What makes this initiative so important?

It is a historical breakthrough. While academics have been conducting antipsychiatry research for well over for half a century now, this is the very first time that an award of this nature is available. As such, it signals to the world that this field of inquiry has come of age.

The scholarship is being materialized at an opportune time. Key academics have demonstrated the enormous harm done by psychiatry (see Burstow 2015 and Breggin 2008), with the number of books and articles in this area rapidly growing. Correspondingly, as Whitaker (2010) argues, we have arrived at a moment where imminent action is called for, for we are now facing “an epidemic of iatrogenic [doctor-created] illness.”

Given the overwhelmingly and disproportionate availability of “regular” scholarships for studying issues related to psychiatry, equity and academic freedom themselves require that antipsychiatry scholars, including exceptional ones, have more equitable access to scholarship support.

Scholars at OISE, University of Toronto are at the centre of and at the cutting edge of much of this research. At present, the largest single group of antipsychiatry scholars anywhere in North America are the members of the Burstow thesis support group at OISE, which itself is attracting/inspiring scholars far and wide. This scholarship will add an additional magnet for attracting excellent future scholars. Correspondingly, already a wide range of exciting new forays into psychiatry are being made by these students.

A possible precursor of a better society, this scholarship, in short, is part of a necessary synergy happening locally and globally that aims to foster research, policy, and social change informed by the critical resurgence of the antipsychiatry movement.

Update

This is a matching scholarship, and when the announcement of it was first posted several months ago Dr. Bonnie Burstow pledged to match up to $50,000 dollars in donations by others — an announcement that was successful beyond our wildest dreams.

While that period of matching is over, a second matching has been started for the scholarship by an anonymous donor by which that donor will match every Canadian dollar put in now with an American dollar, up to $50,000.00.

Click here to make your gift to the Dr. Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry at the University of Toronto today.